“Now we have, on the books of the large, public multinational energy companies, $7 trillion of subprime carbon assets,” he said. “Their valuation is based on an assumption that is even more ridiculous and absurd than the assumption that these people that couldn’t make a downpayment or monthly payments were good risks for home mortgages. The assumption is that those $7 trillion can be sold and burned.”

I think people will "get" this framing, because we've all lived through the subprime mortgage bubble's crash.

President Obama issued an executive order titled “Preparing the United States for the Impacts of Climate Change.”

Promoting “preparedness” is doubtless a good idea. As the executive order notes, climate impacts—which include, but are not limited to, heat waves, heavier downpours, and an increase in the number and intensity of wildfires—are “already affecting communities, natural resources, ecosystems, economies, and public health across the Nation.” However, one of the dangers of this enterprise is that it tends to presuppose, in a Boy Scout-ish sort of way, that “preparedness” is possible.

As we merrily roll along, radically altering the planet, we are, as the leaked I.P.C.C. report makes clear, increasingly in danger of committing ourselves to outcomes that will simply overwhelm societies’ ability to adapt. Certainly they will overwhelm the abilities of frogs and trees and birds to adapt. Thus, any genuine “preparedness” strategy must include averting those eventualities for which preparation is impossible. [emphasis mine]

Saying, "Let's be prepared for climate change." invokes the mindset of "normal" change, for which we can prepare, not the planet turning into an uninhabitable Eaarth. This phrase is a covert form of climate change denial.

“few governments are as yet prepared to launch the sorts of efforts that might even begin to effectively address the peril of climate change, they will increasingly be seen as obstacles to essential action and so as entities that need to be removed. In short, climate rebellion.” [emphasis mine]

Their 24th-century historian identifies the "carbon combustion complex": a self-sustaining global network of powerful industries that includes fossil fuel producers, energy companies and manufacturers reliant on cheap energy, but also road builders, banks and PR firms.

But it’s important to realise this isn’t an obvious conspiracy,” says Oreskes. “And it’s not the fact that they are coordinated that is nefarious, it’s the ends to which they put that coordination: confusion, disinformation and potentially fraud, to stop action on a serious, real problem that potentially effects all of our lives.”

Robert Scribbler's framing of Obama's climate change policy impressed me. He decries Obama's support for some helpful climate policies, while pursuing others that support further fossil fuel investment. He doesn't mention that the pro-fossil fuel extraction policies far outweigh whatever carbon footprint reduction might result from the helpful policies.

... sometimes, as with fracking, as with other new pipeline construction, and as with the Shell Arctic drilling expedition, his policies cut against the grain of a necessarily rapid reduction in carbon emissions.